Why I am complacent
May 13, 2009 2:28 pm American Politics, Economics and Finance, PoliticsI was pondering this issue, my complacency in the face of the Obama onslaught. There are many reasons to be seriously perturbed.
Here are the reasons why we should all be upset.
The economy is ratshit. The capitalist system is in disgrace. A lot of banking is revealed as a Ponzi scheme. More toxic debt will emerge from eastern Europe, in frightfully high ratios to total GDP. Americans have put in the Democrats for a term or two, free of filibustering by the Republicans. The terms of the bailouts of GM and Chrysler may affect the rights of bond holders and thus the ability to raise capital in the future, provided there is capital to be raised when the inflation engendered by Obama will be wrecking the economy further .
So why am I complacent? Why do I have this feeling that my time is best spent not fretting about the interventionsist tide?
My theories are:
1) I have a job now and have become a sell-out since I have a few years’ worth of job security.
2) I have lived long enough to know that the onslaught will work itself out. That every offensive is met eventually with a counter-offensive.
3) Even if the United States is pulling permanently to the Left, even if Obama is a psycho- narcissist, there is nothing I can do about it.
I prefer theory 2.
Friends to the right of me are working themselves into a frenzy about Obama. Friends to the left of me are beginning to think the US will finally see universal medical care, while noting the continuity of Obama and Bush in foreign policy.
Folks! The Republicans are in the penalty box, and will be there for a major game misconduct. They have messed with excessive de-regulation, they have served the rich altogether too well; their telecommunications policy is anti-Internet. In foreign policy I think Bush was right to invade Iraq and I think the casualty level was trivial for a nation of 330 million, though others are still enraged by that war. In any case, the Republicans are out; they are leaderless and they have no ideas except lower taxes and more de-regulation. It is not going to sell.
Thus the Dems will advance into the middle of the electorate, assisting all their client groups, stifling innovation in education, favouring organized labour, messing at the edges with capitalism, working for Google against the carriers, until their scandals, crimes, attitudes and misdemeanors will bring them down. In four years or eight?
In the meantime, don’t forget to breathe.
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Dalwhinnie
Arran Gold :
Date: May 13, 2009 @ 2:51 PM
“The Republicans are in the penalty box, and will be there for a major game misconduct. They have messed with excessive de-regulation…”
There was an old joke that Austrians have been trying to convince the world that Beethoven was Austrian and that Hitler was German.
Based on the above quote from “Dalwhinnie” it seems that Left has been successful in convincing the world that it was Bush who repealed the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999, via Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act which broke down barriers between banks, securities firms, mortgage lenders and insurance companies, and that it was Clinton who signed the Sarbanes-Oxley Act in 2002 which set new or enhanced standards for all US public company boards, management and public accounting firms.
Arran Gold :
Date: May 13, 2009 @ 2:54 PM
Addendum
I propose theory #4 for explaining the complacency and I posted this earlier, http://www.barrelstrength.com/2009/04/21/fooled-by-intense-intelligence/. Maybe you are blinded by “intense intelligence”.
Dalwhinnie :
Date: May 14, 2009 @ 10:26 AM
Arran Gold is completely correct in his factual assertions. But he knows as well as I that a) whoever is holding the can of shit at the election gets shit-canned and b)for many years we have heard noting from the Republicans except calls for lower taxes and less regulation. To the extent I have seen their policies up close, in telecommunications, their FCC was notably pro-monopolist, which, paradoxically, is what you get when you “liberate” those with market power to squeeze profits from those without it. I have listened to squadrons of well-paid economists tout the telecom party line, that the regulator that regulates (market power) least regulates best. Uh, no.
And in the field of intellectual property, there are advocates of the privatization of the letters of the alphabet. Thus we would end up paying royalties to law firms for the use of language.
The Republicans have denied those aspects of life (such as common infrastructure) which work best when they are free, as in free speech, or freely accessible, as in highways, or the Internet.
I offer neither apology nor equivocation for my reservations about the Republicans; I do not think they are sufficiently conservative, in my understanding of the term. They have become merely the party of successful appropriation. Conservatism is about more than property acquisition, though rights to property are the practical basis of exercising political rights.
The party that founded land-grant colleges, provided for the settlement of the West by granting title to those who tilled the soil, who liberated the slaves, and encouraged the building of railroads, had some vision. This vision was broader than mantras about the magic of the market; it had some conception of the broader purposes of political existence.
Glendronach :
Date: May 14, 2009 @ 6:05 PM
Let’s stop treating the current Washington situation like a bunch of Trekkies critiquing the J.J. Abrams movie: you don’t take graph paper into a movie theatre and you park some ideological shibboleths outside the FEBA of political conflict.
The GOP has to do more than evangelize the Ferengi Great Material Continuum to the American electorate, if it wants to regain power. Whether it is compassionate conservatism or Klingon Social Credit, the next platform has to be more than repackaged Laffer curves and blind faith in the plutocracy.
Sorry, my day-trading friends, but political warfare is far from a clinical exercise. It tends to be the most illogical, soul-sapping form of human engagement one can encounter. But it has conventions that are damned hard to overcome, and life is not worth wasting devising means to bypass them.
duggan's dew :
Date: May 15, 2009 @ 5:10 AM
“Good morning to the day, and next, my gold. Open the shrine, that I may see my saint.”
Pursuit of wealth is, was and will be the great goad to activity in the public sphere. Consider the enormous range of preferences, perversions and pranks into which the sexual impulse is diverted and it will cast light on the many ways greed manifests itself. Why, socialist redistribution itself is probably only a form of repressed sexuality – a solemn and circular exercise in enforced sterility. I shudder to ponder the sexual equivalence of regulatory bodies possessing great economic force, as they discuss market discipline and inputs and outcomes.